Cardiovascular disease is a common and frequent disease, threatening human life and health seriously. Annually, there are about 20 million persons dying of acute cardiovascular events worldwide, and more than half of them died of acute myocardial infarction (AMI). With population aging in China, the incidence of AMI showed a clear upward trend, which has been already close to the international average level. In recent years, raised monitoring and treating level has lowered the mortality of myocardial infarction. But the survivals are still at a high risk of reoccurrence of acute cardiovascular events, e.g. the myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure and sudden death etc. Accordingly, except active treatment in acute phase, the secondary prevention of myocardial infarction should be strengthened.
The secondary prevention of myocardial infarction refers to the prevention of cardiovascular events and improvement patients' life quality after occurrence of myocardial infarction. As shown by many studies, there are a lot of drugs reported to have an active and positive effect on long-term secondary prevention of myocardial infarction, e.g. platelet inhibitors (aspirine), β-receptor blockers, statins and angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEI) etc. In addition, efficacy of these drugs are not influenced by patients' other conditions, such as age and gender etc.
As confirmed by a large-scale medicine clinical trial results, although afore-mentioned drugs, e.g. platelet inhibitors (aspirine), β-receptor blockers, statins and angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEI) etc can significantly decrease the mortality rate caused by AMI, a great many survivals are usually led to disability or death due to the cardiovascular events, such as re-infarction, severe arrhythmia and heart failure etc. Moreover, these drugs more or less have some adverse reactions, some of which are even very serious. In addition to this, some westerners became gradually aware of that the effect of single drug on secondary prevention may not be as good as that of combined drugs, and developed a series of compound western medicine preparations for secondary prevention of myocardial infarction. In fact, herbal prescriptions have been mainly used for treating disease in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for thousands of years. Even a single herb medicine can be considered as a small compound prescription, because it contains complicated ingredients. Besides, the TCM prescriptions have the advantages of eased efficacy, attenuated toxicity and increased effect by drug compatibility and reduced side effect, which is accordingly suitable for long-term administration as secondary prevention medicine.